


Allemande: The First Sunset of a Dying Star

by ginger_infiltrator



Series: Suite in the Key of Suffering [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dreaming, Evisceration, Force Bond, Gore, Horror, M/M, Medical Trauma, Nightmares, Surgery, but like in a medical setting, dreamscape, fucked up force bond, graphic descriptions of wounds, medical gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:23:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6650008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginger_infiltrator/pseuds/ginger_infiltrator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>General Hux’s imperial forces regroup after the destruction of Starkiller Base. In the night cycle he finds himself dreaming for the first time in many years, and it’s not quite what he remembered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allemande: The First Sunset of a Dying Star

What a strange thing, the general thinks, to experience such triumph and defeat in a single day _._

General Hux is a man not prone to dwelling on the past, but as this catastrophe is still fresh, he allows himself to drift into the misery a bit. Out of the viewport, he can see the orange halo that was once his mighty Starkiller base. The surface of the new star pulses. The orange color indicates that the star is not long for this universe, either. It burns far too cold. Soon it will expand and then implode on itself, leaving a dull brown dwarf until that, too, will die out. Hux will not even be able to look out at the universe and see the burning point of his greatest success and greatest failure as he does now. He has run enough simulations that he knows the star’s future long before it was even born. He just never expected this particular scenario to play out.

 _What a fucking colossal failure_. He is not deluded enough to place the blame firmly on anyone’s shoulders, even his own. He owns the majority of this failure, which ignites the lingering self-loathing deeply buried in himself, but the anger towards everyone else who had failed far outshines it. His pilots, his lieutenants, his engineers, everyone. This was a weakness he could not see, easily exploited by the rag-tag resistance’s idiot beginners luck. Unacceptable. Utterly unacceptable. The knowledge that a majority of them were now scattered atoms in the dying star pleased him. He hoped the searing heat of the star had burned them inside out. And Ren, that bastard-

Hux draws sudden breath through his nose. Ren had completely unraveled when he was needed most. When everything fell to pieces around him, he had imploded, just as Hux had always feared. The knight was far too volatile to be relied on. The force, he thinks, is far too nebulous. Not like steel, or plasma. A capricious thing, the force. It may have brought Ren and Snoke their powers, but in this instance it had clearly favored the scavenger girl and the Resistance. Hux can see why Ren was so driven to destroy his former Jedi master. Infuriatingly, the favor of the force could tip the balance of a battle and send everything the general had meticulously planned in a downward spiral.

Hux furrows his brow. The gaggle of imperial officers and soldiers behind him asserts an almost physical force on his shoulders. The ragged, lost breaths echo around him. Someone is even sobbing. Unacceptable. He spins on his heel and faces them.

“Return to your posts!” he barks.

His Stormtroopers straighten to attention immediately, well and thoroughly programmed. Some officers still uneasily gape at him.

“Return. To. Your. Posts.” He grits out. “We regroup at omega base.”

The next twelve hours whirl by in a torrent of communiques and status reports. Nothing catches the general off guard. He expected the shocked and vindicated reactions of his rivals. _Let them all gloat_ , he thinks. _I’ll prove them wrong again_. General Hux has enough side projects to fuel his retaliation. His navigators set a course for the furthest fleet of imperial ships on the Outer Rim. The shockwaves from Starkiller had severely damaged the Finalizer’s drives. She could only limp along at sub hyper drive, lest she shake herself apart. It would be a long, slow crawl, like a dying animal dragging its entrails behind it.

After thirty-two hours on his feet, exhaustion begins to creep in beneath the static blanket of adrenaline that’s been fueling him since the oscillator first failed. There’s one more matter to attend to before he retires, he remembers sourly.

…

The Finalizer’s medbay is surprisingly empty after such a disaster. With the Stormtroopers, the First Order is quick to cut its losses and abandon its wounded. More can always be acquired and reprogrammed. The advantage with an army of identical pawns is that so many can fall and be replaced in weeks. Officers, however, are a slightly different matter. Three navigators whine as the medical droids clinically prod at their various bruises and lacerations. Up against the far wall, there is a cadre of bacta tanks, now half-full with burned and battered men and women. General Hux takes stock of his casualties with little compassion. Most were left on Starkiller as it collapsed. These broken people should be grateful he has allowed them this small mercy and did not shoot them on sight. General Hux schools down the wrathful tide that surges in him. He does not have enough personnel for that kind of reckoning.

Certainly not enough to let the man before him go.

Ren, of course, receives the most elaborate bacta tank in the entire wing. In the entire empire, in fact. Hux understands enough that he cannot lose the knight and remain with his own life intact. Therefore, the best medical officers and best equipment were all allocated to fixing him.

The first few hours must’ve been agony for Ren. Or, they would have been, had the medics not found an adequate concentration of sedatives to keep him still. Had that breakthrough not happened, the medical personnel would have been decimated.

The Wookie’s bow caster had ripped a ragged hole through Ren’s abdomen. Complete gut shot. Hux had found him, bleeding out in the slushy red snow, trees shaking with the Starkiller’s death throes or Ren’s force rage, greenish-brown bile leaking slowly out of the wound. The next few hours in medbay had been spent scrubbing the bacteria out of his abdominal cavity. Wouldn’t be fitting for a knight of Ren to be felled by his own gut flora. It was a messy burned wound. His intestines were charred and some fused together. The doctors had removed all the damaged coils of intestine, calling it a wash and connecting up what he had left. Possibly nothing detrimental to his digestion. Possibly a decrease in nutrient absorption.

Ren floats limply in the bacta tank, now terribly necessary for bacteriostasis in the light of his digestive perforations. Nanobots had been at work repairing the underlying fascia, but Hux could still peer at the glistening pocketed folds of Ren’s descending colon. Every few minutes the coil would undulate with peristaltic movements. Perhaps Ren would be spared the indignity of incontinence after all. Muscular fibers crawled slowly across the gaping mess in his side, twitching faintly with neuronal charges. Patchy nascent muscles longed to flex across the great expanse but barely reached halfway. Dermis and skin crawled far behind. According to the charts in front of him, Hux determines that the recovery would take at least five days, not accounting for the rapid regeneration rumored to force-users.

The crevasse traversing the long planes of Ren’s face seeps pink plasma into the bacta tank. It will be healed in due time. Other wounds demand attention.  His eyes dart beneath closed lids in the frantic dance of REM sleep, thick eyelashes fluttering. Fingertips tap against his own thighs. It seems Ren is as restless as ever, even in a drug-induced coma. Hux tries to ignore the stiffness of Ren’s half-hard member. Modesty was not something that the medical division had in mind. Clothes harbor the nastiest of bacteria, especially encrusted with blood and god knows what else. Hux idly recalls the priapism sometimes caused by extended usage of the bacta tanks, but relaxes that line of thought when Ren softens and becomes a vulnerable thing again.

Hux sighs and succumbs to the inertia of his exhaustion, slumping in a stiff chair in front of Ren’s bacta chamber.  All of the unease he usually feels in the knight’s presence is completely absent. Especially when he hangs limp and twitching before him, completely unconscious. The sheer vulnerability strikes a dissonant chord in Hux’s mind. Perhaps this entire time he had seen his rival as a metal monolith. Volatile, yes, but also a thing made of durasteel that could never yield. This body suspended before him is fleshy, soft. It tasks the general’s brain too much to think this way. First his indestructible base had crumbled before him, now this steel knight was rusting and falling apart.

The weight of sleeplessness catches up with the general. The buzzing in his mind slows and skips. For a period of time, he lists his head against his shoulder and closes his eyes. The bone-tired emptiness of thought feels like relief after so many hours so focused.

The intruding thought pierces through like a bolt straight to the base of Hux’s brain. A scream, primal and anguished, echoes loudly in his head. He startles out of his dozing and grips the arms of his chair. Wide-eyed, he stares transfixed at Ren’s tank. The knight’s eyes open, slightly.

_Hux was in the evacuation shuttle again, with the terrified medics, assorted Stormtroopers, and the mortally wounded Ren. The dour man had tried so hard to stifle all his noises of discomfort, but flat-out howled as a medic dug his hands into the gaping wound at his side. The walls of the shuttle shook violently, not entirely due to atmospheric turmoil of the dying planet below._

_“Ren, stop shaking the shuttle apart!” The general barked._

_By this point the knight was far past coherent thought and just continued his agonized animal wailing. It took three men to hold down his forearm for a medical officer to administer intravenous sedatives. It took seven doses to finally bring Ren to a state of calm. In the aftermath, one orderly huddled in a corner, nursing a broken arm for his efforts. The jagged bone of his ulna erupted from his skin in a pearlescent spike. Another leaned against a wall, staring blankly in a heavily concussed stupor._

_Ren laid slack-jawed, his eyes open and unfocused. From time to time his head would loll back and forth. A medic grasped his jaw and tilted his head back, aligning the knight’s trachea to feed a tube down. Ren’s tongue slid against the bottom, caressing it in a horrifically sexual reflex. For a moment General Hux felt a witness to the knight’s violation, especially as personnel cut away his thick robes from every direction, a quick preparation for immediate surgery and bacta submersion._

_The shuttle bay had stunk of blood, with undertones of bitter bile and the warm scent of digesting food. That olfactory miasma was the first thing that came back to the general. In an abstract way, he knew he was reviewing this scene, the flow of time compressed and packaged neatly in a single burst of memory. Through it all he could hear the outraged scream ripping at him, even as the knight’s mouth was stuffed full and gagged._

Hux narrows his focus back to Ren’s black eyes. The knight twitches violently, limbs spasming in tiny arcs. The bacta bubbles with his movements. Without breaking eye contact, Hux shouts for the nearest anesthesiologist. Subduing Ren this way is much simpler than talking him down in consciousness. Throughout the process, though, General Hux feels the burn of his gaze on him. They make eye contact again before Ren’s eyes roll back slowly in his head and his eyelids flutter shut again.

“Sir,” mumbles one of the medical officers. “This dosage, it’s not sustainable. His liver and kidneys will begin to shut down within days.”

“Would you rather he be awake?”

In his fit, Ren had knocked down the General’s observation chair. Small objects had been cast out and smashed against the walls. Hux doubts that his men could withstand the brunt of Ren’s pain-fueled force powers without massive casualties.

“I would suggest you find an alternative course of treatment for Lord Ren. I cannot imagine the consequences Supreme Leader Snoke will inflict if you cripple his protégé further.”

The medical officer desperately fixates on Hux’s face, as if trying to find a solution to his pressing and possibly fatal dilemma there. He finds none.

“I trust you have this situation under control?”

The general’s focus wavers. He levels the most intimidating stare he can manage at the moment, even though the medical officer’s face blurs and shifts before him in an abstract ripple. The distorted head nods. At this stage of sleep deprivation, that will have to suffice.

 

…

 

General Hux’s quarters on the Finalizer cannot equal those on Starkiller Base. There he had his entire world in front of him, a vast expanse of white snow and conifers before a night sky brimming with potential. Accommodations for the general aboard the Finalizer might be more lavish than those of a petty officer, but could not aspire to the extravagancies on the weaponized planet. A larger bed, plusher sheets. Still minimal in a military bent but offering small creature comforts due his rank.

Hux goes about his nightly ablutions in a fatigued haze. His numb fingers manipulate the knobs his shower stall, selecting a quick sonic rinse rather than wasting his water allowances. The ionic stream scrapes his skin, a far cry from the welcoming warm embrace of water. He imagines all his failures sloughing off of him like a layer of caked-in dirt. In reality he cannot shed his guilt so easily. The fatigue presses at his shoulders and he slumps in the shower stall.

His nightly rituals slide by in an automated assembly line. Hair brushed, teeth scoured, skin moisturized. Nightclothes donned and an uncharacteristic swan dive into the overlarge mattress.

When he was small, Hux suffered from the most intense night terrors. He would wake screaming, slowly coming to full consciousness in his mother’s arms. The Hux patriarch often stood in his doorway, disdainful gaze slowly boring holes into the younger Hux’s sense of security. 

In those panicked dreams he could not escape the destruction and disorder. His world ignited and twisted into something terrifyingly chaotic and indescribable. His mother burned. His father froze. All the cities he knew ignited and broiled into a confused mess of desperate people scrabbling for survival. He caught fire and was cast adrift on the rippling tide of human desperation. The masses in his mind tore him open, his innards churning in their midst and his blood peppering their faces.

His father could not tolerate this nocturnal weakness in his oldest son. The younger Hux was sent to therapists, undoubtedly the best in the scattered remains of the empire. He was ferreted away in secret, craven nocturnal fears hidden far away from rival imperial families. There he learned, through the harshest of mental exercises, to master his own subconscious. He made his mind his servant, directing its nightly wanderings into something innocuous and calm. The most volatile of thoughts were sublimated and crushed down to restore the order he so desperately craved, internally and externally. Hux stifled his desperate ravings and doubts. He could barely hear them anymore. Just whispers down below.

Nights like these, the sinister murmurings from beneath threaten to breach the surface. Hux suffocates them as best he can, strangling errant thoughts and carelessly tossing them aside. He is his own master, and his mind is his own. This he has been taught. He will not lose control of this.

Hux closes his eyes and begin his nightly procedure, relaxing first the long-ignored but tensed muscles in his toes and feet. The slackening wave continues to his calves and thighs, upwards through his pelvis and painfully contracted abdominal muscles. The flood washes over his upper half, flowing out finally in the numbing of his fingertips. At last his physical body fully relaxes and he feels his consciousness float in a comforting way to that place he now knows with familiar fondness. He imagines himself, like he does every night, floating placidly in a dark body of water. It is neither to shallow nor too deep, not too warm or too cold. An equilibrium, finally.

Hux returns to this state night after night. Here he can float away, no anxieties to tear him limb from limb, no depressive thoughts to pull him under. He worked hard to achieve this specific sense of enlightened calm. Lucid dreaming did not come easily to him in therapy. This stagnant peace is the only thing the can manage, but it is enough for him. At last, a respite.

Hux floats serenely. The demands of the most recent hours dissolve and bubble away on a gentle tide. He is vaguely aware of a small disturbance, an upward rippling from the depths below him. Up from the deep, something stretches. Hux fights against this upsurge as best he can, schooled in this particular form of repression since childhood. Still he finds himself bobbing vigorously on a new frenzied tide.   A pressure, something like a hand, clamps onto one ankle. Hux only has a few seconds to gasp in surprise before the phantom grip tugs sharply and steadily downwards. He should feel the panic of drowning, desperation as his lungs fill with water, but this is not exactly a physical dreamscape. He blows bubbles with his hollering but never feels the deep animal sense of terror at being pulled underwater.  He shifts, feeling as though the pressure around his ankle pulls him towards a gaping void to somewhere more sinister. Hux does not want to go. Ultimately he has no choice.

 

…

 

General Hux blearily rouses and looks upon his own body. It shifts, at one moment the familiar slim expanse of his abdomen, another moment a solidly built mass of bunching muscles far too broad for Hux’s mind to comprehend. What comes easily is the pain, the searing pain radiating out from his left side. Hux struggles with unfamiliar eyelids, trying to assess the physical condition eliciting such agony. He finds that his limbs will not respond, sluggishly twitching in a futile effort to move. He can move his eyes to some degree, but the rest of his body lags in a chemical haze. Hux cannot lift these foreign limbs. He can only watch through the blur between his new dark eyelashes.

Unyielding metal fingers delve into the rip in his skin. The medical droid spears into a gaping wound and stretches the ragged skin outwards, elongating the torn hole in his side and deepening the crevasse. The empty space tingles. Hux can feel the recycled breeze on the winding expanse of his intestines, so unfamiliar and horridly cold. His body aches, deep and not entirely from the medical attentions he currently receives. A vague figure above him brandishes a long flexible tube. The specter inserts the tube slowly into the space stretched open by the medical droid. The sucking force pulls against the tightly woven musculature of his back as it vacuums out the foul sludge pouring from his compromised digestive tract.  Hux tries to scream, his lips numbly brushing together ineffectually. His vocal cords vibrate demurely in his larynx.  The medic does not hesitate.

As Hux adjusts to the scorching agony in his belly, he slowly keys in on the subtle ache in his shoulder and face. Burned edges like paper curl outwards and brush the healthy skin around the cut. Deep in the trench of the gash his naked muscles cry out in confusion at the caress of air. It is a pitiful complaint when compared to the searing in his abdomen. But it is there, demanding attention.

 Hux prefers the surgeon’s hands to the medical droids. It’s a softer touch, at first, still warm through nitrile gloves. The hands shift through his glossy organs, worrying at segments that had fused together. The nerves here had been blessedly scorched away. It’s a small mercy as the surgeon gently palpates the mess of confused flesh. Hux’s short respite shatters as the surgeon tugs the mangled length of intestine out gently but firmly. The distention pulls at the still enervated tissue, stinging harshly in alarm. Hux can feel the glide of intestine against his skin as centimeter after centimeter are coaxed out of his wound.

Foreign emotions surge alongside the pain. Deep humiliation at being reduced to this pathetic hunk of bleeding meat. Humiliation at being bested. And a pulsing frustration at being unable to reach out and grasp the power once so eagerly summoned. The rage slowly builds, eventually drowning out the physical agony.

Hux can feel himself dissociating from this broken body, the power holding him here in the nightmare growing lax in its mental turmoil. The floating sensation returns. He is resurfacing.

The psychic atmosphere retracts in desperation. The grip about Hux’s ankle returns, tugging frantically but weaker now in its distress. Hux claws his way upwards to waking, furious at being dragged down in the first place.

Hux wakes to the long forgotten sensation of sheets clinging to his skin, tacky with cooling sweat. Here there are no comforting arms to hold him as he quivers. Hux’s hands vibrate rapidly so that all his movements become halting and clumsy. His trembling hands rock his head as he covers his eyes.   

Eventually Hux will have to determine if Ren subjected the Finalizer’s entire crew to his fever dreams, or if it was just luck of the draw that had plunged the general straight into the heart of Ren’s delirium. Eventually.

For now, he shakes and sweats out a bizarre pang of pity that muddles his indignation.

**Author's Note:**

> Alright thanks for bearing with me I know I'm not an author. I figured I should torture Hux a little for once. 
> 
> You can direct any complains to http://gingerinfiltrator.tumblr.com/
> 
> Don't mind me while I dig my dirty little fingers in intestines and cackle.


End file.
